EDITORIAL NOTEBOOK; Ringo Starr, at Age 70. The Beatles, Ageless.

By EDUARDO PORTER

Published: July 7, 2010

Ringo Starr is turning 70 on Wednesday. It feels as though youth itself is now 70 years old.

I wasn't yet 6 when the Beatles played their last live performance atop the Apple Corps building on Savile Row in London, January 1969. They split four years before I got my first Beatles album. Still, I can keep track of my teenage years by Beatles songs I happened to be enthralled with at the time. Forty years after they broke up, my 6-year-old son is learning to play ''Eleanor Rigby'' on the piano.

Not only are the Beatles the best-selling act of all time, but everybody has done their songs, from Jimi Hendrix to David Bowie to Elton John. ''Strawberry Fields Forever'' has been covered by Aimee Mann and Los Fabulosos Cadillacs of Argentina. The Brazilian band Os Mutantes sneaked the guitar solo from ''While My Guitar Gently Weeps'' into its hit ''Ando Meio Desligado.'' Sesame Street's songbook includes ''Hey Food,'' and ''Letter B.''

In 2001, the compilation album ''1'' was a top seller in the United States and Britain. ''It's beyond an obsession. It's an ideal for living,'' Noel Gallagher of the 1990s British-pop band Oasis once said. ''With every song that I write, I compare it to the Beatles.''

It is somewhat odd that the musical tastes of today's youth are still linked closely to a band that released its last album when the parents of today's teenagers hadn't even met and music still came on vinyl. When Ringo was born, the median life expectancy in the United States was only 63. More than half the 20-somethings who paid $4.50 for a ticket to their last concert in Candlestick Park in 1966 are dead by now.

Maybe the famously self-centered boomer generation into which the Beatles poured their music never grew up. Like no generation before, boomers crafted identities out of tastes for music, dress and politics. As we moved into middle age, we brought along the Beatles and passed them on to our kids.

Wherever it comes from, there is some unique quality about what the Beatles had to offer. It's not as good as eternal youth, but it is a close second. To me, their music does not sound any older than when 64 was a much longer way off. Maybe this is what we mean by timelessness. It's turning 70 while remaining 24 at the same time. EDUARDO PORTER